Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era [Paperback]

Terry Smith (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226763854 | ISBN-13: 978-0226763859 | Publication Date: September 15, 2001 | Edition: 1

Impossible Presence brings together new work in film studies, critical theory, art history, and anthropology for a multifaceted exploration of the continuing proliferation of visual images in the modern era. It also asks what this proliferation—and the changing technologies that support it—mean for the ways in which images are read today and how they communicate with viewers and spectators.
Framed by Terry Smith's introduction, the essays focus on two kinds of strangeness involved in experiencing visual images in the modern era. The first, explored in the book's first half, involves the appearance of oddities or phantasmagoria in early photographs and cinema. The second type of strangeness involves art from marginalized groups and indigenous peoples, and the communicative formations that result from the trafficking of images between people from vastly different cultures. With a stellar list of contributors, Impossible Presence offers a wide-ranging look at the fate of the visual image in modernity, modern art, and popular culture.

Contributors:
Jean Baudrillard
Marshall Berman
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Elizabeth Grosz
Tom Gunning
Peter Hutchings
Fred R. Myers
Javier Sanjines
Richard Shiff
Hugh J. Silverman
Terry Smith

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

What has been the fate of the image in modernity, modern art, popular cultures, in postmodern art and in postmodernity? Has the simulacrum reached the point of unconditional purity? Or has the real returned often enough to convince even the most abject aficionados of posthumanism that presence insists most powerfully as persistence despite its apparent impossibility? The great, historical generative structures—perspectival space, the picturesque visual journey, and Baroque theatricality—have long since been displaced by two distinctly modern ones: the surface and the screen. The encounter between the historical structures and the modern ones has, we can now see, been all along conducted through the "flesh" of the photographic. These intersections—definitive of modernism—continue to challenge all visual artists with something to show. They are also vitally shaping visual communication in public spheres.

In his introduction Terry Smith shows how each chapter contributes to our understanding of how the interplay between viscerality and enervation, the struggles between surface and screen, and the rise of the photogenic have fundamentally shaped modern visual cultures. The essays in this volume trace the histories of these encounters. Marshall Berman sets out the emergence of New York's Time Square as a paradigm site of electric interaction between city and self. Peter J. Hutchings follows the gaze of subjects in early photographs as it reaches across time and space to unsettle theorists of modern seeing. For Tom Gunning, the amateur photography of the Lumière brothers revealed a strange world of phenomena and actions, actual but "impossible in appearance," which they then, in their cinematograph, set in awe-inspiring motion. It was this aspect of photography, Richard Shiff shows, which most marked modernist painting from Cézanne and Seurat to Chuck Close, forcing its digitalization. One outcome, by the 1960s, was the Warhol phenomenon, read in two distinct ways here by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, as an art shaped by the esthetics of fashion photography and video. Surface and screen took on new meanings at each stage, as they have again, recently, in the contemporary Aboriginal art movement, explored as it happened by Fred R. presence—indeed. Throughout, the body demanded figurative presence—indeeed, Elizabeth Grosz insists that it remains the basis of an ethics of everyday life while Javier Sanjines shows how an imagery of the body can be a site of both the construction of national identities and their reimaging Another Vidler traces the impacts of digitalization on design and our anxieties about architecture.

Contributors:
Jean Baudrillard
Marshall Berman
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
Elizabeth Grosz
Tom Gunning
Peter Hutchings
Fred R. Myers
Javier Sanjines
Richard Shiff
Hugh J. Silverman
Terry Smith

About the Author

Terry Smith is a professor of art history and the director of the Power Institute, Centre for Art and Visual Culture, Unversity of Sydney, Australia. He is the editor of In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 309 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (September 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226763854
• ISBN-13: 978-0226763859
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,605,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)